1. The Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to networking technologies; and more specifically, to an integrated message user interface in which the user experience is standardized regardless of the type of message, and in which logs are maintained on a per-message basis thereby facilitating organization of the messages.
2. Background and Related Art
Communication is an essential need of humankind. The advent of the telephone represents one of the most important advances in communication technology, allowing real-time audio conversations to occur even over vast distances. As humanity progresses further into the information age, we find increasing diversity in the number of technologies that may be used to electronically communicate. For example, e-mail, instant messaging, shared windows, and electronic white-boarding are all in common use.
Even telephone technology alone has greatly diversified when telephone technology is defined as any networking technology that facilitates real-time audio conversations. For example, one can now use the conventional regular land-line telephone using Plain-Old Telephone Service (POTS) to engage in a telephone conversation. Furthermore, new telephone technologies have emerged enabling mobile telephones. Even the standard Internet Protocol (IP) may be used to communicate real-time audio conversations using Voice-over IP (VoIP).
While this vast array of communication technologies has greatly improved our freedom to communicate, it has also presented organizational challenges. For instance, there is typically one application used to engage in instant messaging, another to engage in e-mail, yet another to engage in a telephone call, and so forth. Accordingly, it is quite difficult to organize all communications across message types. This is especially true for synchronous communications such as telephone conversations, instant messaging, shared windows, and the like. Since messages are difficult to organize across message types, it is often difficult to correlate related messages to thereby harness the value provided from the information within the messages. Accordingly, information overload often prevails.
What would therefore be advantageous are mechanisms for organizing messages across a variety of different message types in an intuitive manner.